Ted Dealey

Edward Musgrove “Ted” Dealey was the publisher of the Dallas Morning News and harbored great animosity against JFK. Most notably, he told Kennedy to his face in the White House that he was not “the man on horseback” that the country was searching for but rather a wimp “on Caroline’s tricycle.”

Dealey’s antipathy towards Kennedy was common in Dallas. Among all major American cities, Dallas had voted for Richard Nixon in the highest proportion in the 1960 election.

However, the Texas native, who obtained a Master’s degree in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1915, was not a stereotypical small-mined, southern “Yankee hater.”

Dealey, who was a fifth generation journalist, was an early crusader against the Ku Klux Klan and used his position at the Dallas Morning News to campaign against local judicial corruption.

The Dallas plaza where JFK was shot was named after his family.

Dealey Plaza in Dallas in 1959. The Texas Schoolbook Depository is the brick building seen at the extreme lower left (photo courtesy kennedy-photos.blogspot.com)